Outset Greece supported the exhibition ‘Don’t Kill Bambi: The Studio 54 Phenomenon Repositioned at Times of Crisis‘, curated by Stavros Kavalaris and presented by Versaweiss/cameos at House of Cyprus in 2016.
Two cities; two different periods; a fiscal crisis alike; a common narration: New York in the 1970s and Athens during the 2000s and 2010s.
One could understand the 1970s in New York as a decade of disillusion, cynicism, bitterness, and anger. For many New Yorkers, as for most of the Greeks after 2008, this extent of time was marked by convoluted hardships, restraining barriers, frustration, and an overwhelming feeling that the country had lost its direction, challenging the very heart of the post-war liberal consensus.
Such dimming environment spawned the short-lived phenomenon of Studio 54, as the mecca of the bright-lights-big-city epicenter of a heavily problematic society in conscious denial. The club owners, Steve Rubell and Ian Schrager, capitalizing on new formations and structures, scrawled the most “tantalizing” history of a reformed middle class conscience.
The exhibition, based on the social analysis of Felix Salt’s titular novel, by the American sociologist, Ralph H. Lutts, examines the sociopolitical parameters of crisis’s canonistical prototypes, as created by a middle class in escapism and its exploiters.
ON VIEW: 27th June – 28th July 2016
